Nia Vardalos, the star and writer of My Big Fat Greek Wedding, is back in a reverse take on Some Like It Hot. She tells Liz Howell how she just had to create herself an all-singing, all-dancing role as a pretend drag queen.

TWO years ago Nia Vardalos was little known outside of her own, albeit extensive, family.

Now, thanks to the phenomenal success of My Big Fat Greek Wedding - the highest grossing romantic comedy and independent film of all time - everybody knows her name, even if they can't all pronounce it.

Now she is back, with another witty script and starring role, in Connie And Carla, a sort of reverse take on Some Like It Hot with a big chunk of Priscilla, Queen Of The Desert thrown in, as she and Toni Collette pretend to be men dressing up as drag queens in a theatre club in order to keep a low profile as they hide from a murderer.

It might sound a much different movie to My Big Fat Greek Wedding but essentially the values are the same, as Nia explained when we chatted in London a few days ago.

"I use my dad as the barometer for the average person," says Nia, laughing.

"My dad is a family man, he's a very average Greek Canadian who came over as an immigrant and made it and he's a happy person. And to see my dad surrounded by all these drag queens and going 'aw come on, it's funny!' made me realise that it's the same movie, twice! It has the same values: love your family - they're the only ones you've got - believe in yourself, follow your dream, love that body - you're stuck with it - just the same values."

It doesn't all go according to plan, especially when Nia's character starts to get the hots for a fellow drag queen's straight brother, played by David Duchovny, but it does open the door for many big production numbers from just about every musical theatre show imaginable.

Nia has an amazing voice and has done her time in that most American of evening entertainment, the dinner theatre.

"It was fun to sing Oklahoma! every night," she says, her big eyes flashing with enthusiasm. "There's a real benefit to being creatively happy, as trite as that sounds. I'd be happy to go back and do dinner theatre."

And the songs used in Connie And Carla?

"That's where I noticed the difference between this movie and My Big Fat Greek Wedding; they never came to me and said 'you can't have this song'. I never knew we were low-budget on My Big Fat Greek Wedding because we had catering on the set. I had only done two small parts in two small films before that, where I had worn my own clothes - but on this one we got to do anything. So I just chose any song I'd ever sung in a musical or any song that I wanted to sing, because at this point I figure that I'm never going to get cast in Cats and I thought well, when am I going to get a chance to sing Memory? Right now!"

Nia may have been familiar with the musical side of the story but the drag queens were a different matter.

"I had to do a lot of research," she says, explaining how the script almost took itself into this new territory. "Suddenly I was in a world that I did not know at all, so I asked lots of questions. One thing was 'why do you do it?' and this beautiful drag queen, resplendent in yellow feathers, said 'because it's the one night a week I feel fabulous'. Who can't relate to that?"

And how did she herself feel when she put on her own drag make-up and clothes?

"My whole thing in life is I'd rather be called funny than pretty. I'm not a girl that ever dreamed of my wedding or my Academy Award speech - I'm just not that type of person at all.

"The ironic thing is that by playing a drag queen, and being in these jeans and corsets that were so tight that Toni and I couldn't even put our own shoes on, walking across the set I felt so sexy! It was really strange for me - and lovely for my husband," she says with another laugh. "And now I wear fishnet stockings and the redder the lipstick, the happier I am."

Writing her own roles also lets her go some way to making up for the dearth of good parts for actresses.

"There are three choices of roles offered to women, I call them wife, mother, prostitute - and I am all three!" she says. "But rather than whine about it, I figure that's the game, that's the world we live in, and learn how to play in it. So luckily I write these parts where I make the boy call me pretty and I get to do fun things like sing. You only get one life so you might as well make it a happy one and that's why I tend to just jump into things. I'm a sort of fearless idiot that way."

Fearless she might be, but Nia Vardalos is no idiot.

Updated: 08:23 Friday, June 11, 2004